The world outside is falling apart. Bugs, Marauders, and fire, oh my. Inside the safe little cocoon of the Bantam Bar, though, everything is hunky dory. Peachy keen. The cat’s meow. Ruffians of all ages, shapes, sizes, and creeds all unite under the joint banner of Bantam Booze, the flagship and only beer offered here. Sure, it tastes like iron and dog piss despite the fact that it’s mostly water by weight, but it gets the job done. Grab a pint, grab a bar stool, and forget about the fact that your town is coming apart at the seems just beyond the walls of this room. Fuck the town. Play the liquor fiddle and watch it burn.
Rach can hardly believe what she’s seeing. The room is packed with people drinking, talking, and laughing. In other words, nothing here is at all out of the ordinary even with the very strongly not ordinary events unfolding outside. In fact, the most out of the ordinary thing about the place is that Rach is not currently sitting on her favorite bar stool and she’s not currently seven or eight beers deep. Everyone is just carrying along with their lives, either blissfully unaware or blissfully uncaring of what’s happening outside.
This is a pretty colossal vibe switch for Rach. She’s coming off the back of putting her life on the line by defending the town against the bugs, then watching Morgan, who she very much likes and respects, putting his life on the line yet again to fight the Marauders. For all she knows, he’s already died trying to buy some time for everyone in this room, and yet none of them could give less of a shit.
She’s seething. This is something of a new feeling for her. By nature, she isn’t really the type to get upset about things. By nurture, she usually isn’t sober for long enough to get upset, and she has the delightful quality of being a happy drunk. Right now, though? She’s beyond pissed. It’s as if she’s seen the light at the end of the tunnel for herself. She’s been given an opportunity, nay, a responsibility. She’s barely been responsible for herself in who knows how long, but now Morgan has entrusted her with the responsibility of others. Her success in rallying the troops of the Bantam Bar will not only help save her life, but also the lives of the very people she now needs to inspire. Furthermore, if Lex, Cannon, and Tay are still alive, then she’s now responsible with keeping them that way. All of this responsibility is equal parts invigorating and overwhelming. She’s full of nervous energy without the tools or knowledge for how to direct that energy. As such, what she does next isn’t so much part of a calculated plan as it is a hip shot cockamamie attempt at greatness.
“Everybody shut up!” she shouts. As soon as she says it, she wishes she had taken the slightest amount of time to think of a better way to get everyone’s attention. To her surprise, though, they do. The raucous laughter dims to a steady hum of conversation, which dims again to near silence. All eyes are on here. Someone coughs in the corner. Rach gulps.
“Hey,” she says with a stupid little wave. She’s now really wishing that she had done any sort of planning with regards to what she was going to say. She’s not a public speaker and all of these glares feel like Cyclops X-Men laser blasts on her weak little human frame. Everyone waits for her to say or do something. Instead, she just offers them a sheepish smile and a few more waves. The silence lasts for a few seconds (or, if you’re Rach, for about eight bajillion hours) before people lose interest and resume their conversations. She’s lost them.
With so many people talking over each other, it’s tough to make out any single conversation in the room, but Rach is pretty sure she can hear people talking about her. Wondering where she’s been, she must have been really bad last night if she’s been in the drunk tank this long, I was starting to get worried when I didn’t see her in her favorite spot. Every snipped of conversation that she hears sinks her heart just a bit more. She now knows with certainty what she suspected just a minute ago: She is not the right person for this job.
Anger once again builds inside her. Hot, sticky frustration. Nobody here will listen to her, nobody her can be bothered to look around and do what needs to be done, everyone here is just a sad sack of shit. She pictures what must be happening to Morgan right now. He’s tough as nails, but he’s not tough enough to take on 20 people at once. His limbs have probably been tossed around the streets of the southern district like bones for dogs. His last thought was probably wondering what was taking Rach so long, wondering if he should have been the one to go to the Bantam Bar instead. She pictures bugs and Marauders overwhelming Cannon, Lex, and Tay as they try to rescue the people of the central district.
They all had a lot to say about their families. About family in general. Rach never had much of a traditional family. It was one of the reasons why she ended up turning to booze, why she found herself magnetized to the same bar stool every night. The habits and routines that have spent the past several years eroding away at her sense of self all stem from both the lack of family she grew up with and the choice of family she found as she aged. All around her are her brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, parents, cousins. All of them withering away together as a family, smiles on all of their faces when they drink the family drink. What a shitty family.
No. Fuck that. Rach has had enough of watching herself and her whole Bantam Bar family slowly dying in their booths and high tops. If she’s willing to give Tay, someone who she literally watched kill a dude, benefit of the doubt for being a product of her environment, if she’s willing to accept that someone like that can change for the better if her surroundings improve first, then why shouldn’t she feel the same way for these people? For herself? She thinks about her own metaphor that she’d used with Morgan just a few minutes ago. This garden is poisoned, and Rach is going to take it upon herself to move all the little seeds into more fertile soil. For the town, for the people in this room, for herself.
She strides towards the nearest high top. There are four people drinking around the table, all of whom Rach is very familiar with. They all gawk and stare at her as she clambers up onto the table, knocking full and empty glasses onto the floor. Between the sounds of shattering glass, the loud and angry complaints of the people whose night she’s just upended, and the sight of a grown woman standing on a table in the middle of the room, everyone’s eyes are again on Rach. Most of them are happily expecting some late night pub drama.
“I said, everybody shut up!” She intended for these words to be a strong callback to her poor attempt at commanding the room earlier, but it comes across pretty lame because the room was already quiet. It’s a bit embarrassing, but she currently feels more empowered than she does stupid. “Good,” she says, as if to try to convince everyone that they had stopped talking because she told them to and not because of the situation leading up to it. “I need everyone to listen up.
“I know you all know who I am, and I know you’re all stoked to see what kind of dumb drunk shit I’m about to do, but I need all of you to actually listen to me for a second. The town is in grave danger. You probably all know by now that there are bugs all over the place. Well, thanks to none of you, that’s no longer the case.”
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
“Then what’s your problem?” comes a sarcastic cry from the crowd. Laughter ripples out through the room. Rach rolls her eyes. She knows that voice to belong to Jorge, a notable piece of shit in the Bantam Bar community. She swallows the spite filled response that bubbles up to her lips, and instead closes her eyes. He’s family. He’s family and he’s sick.
“My problem is that there’s another problem. A much bigger one. Marauders have invaded Camp Trin.”
The laughter in the room dies down. In its place is a cloud of nervous murmurs. Bugs are serious business, but they’re the devil that everyone here at least knows. Most people here haven’t directly interacted with the Marauders. They’re essentially boogeymen. Another bar goer, Gloria, calls out, “The guards will handle it.” She’s met with murmurs of assent.
“The guards aren’t here,” Rach says with as much authority as she can. “They’ve already been taken out.” This is a little white lie by omission, she knows, as very few if any of the town watch were taken out by bugs. A whole lot of them were taken out by herself and Cannon, but these people don’t need to know that. Either way, it doesn’t matter much. Her comment is met with murmurs of resentment.
She continues, “The only people left in the city who can fight are the ones in this room. Warden Morgan is out there defending himself against the Marauders all by himself. Are you all really going to let him give his life to protect you? Just so you can hang out here and get shit faced?”
Jorge, and I really must emphasize that fuck this guys, calls out in his most annoyingly sarcastic voice, “Uh, yeah.”
The crowd laughs. Rach wants to rip Jorge’s nuts off and force feed them to him, but she calms herself down by saying that’s no way to think about your brother when you need your brothers help for something very important. Then, another voice in the crowd calls out, “We wouldn’t be able to help, anyway. We’d just make it worse.” Rach doesn’t know who said it, but everyone in the room agrees. For the first time tonight, her read on the room isn’t that they’re angry or apathetic or nonchalant. The snippets of conversation she hears between people now are dripping with sadness. I’m just a fuck up, what could I do? Morgan shouldn’t waste his life on us. I couldn’t help even if I wanted to.
These aren’t the kinds of things that the Bantam Bar crowd usually talks about. Feelings of inadequacy are always tabled until that mythical point in time called “Tomorrow.” The antidote for self loathing is another round for you and your mates. Never before has she heard these people talk so openly about how helpless they feel, and it breaks Rach’s heart.
“Listen to me. I know how you feel. I don’t think there’s a single person in this room who I haven’t thrown up on at least twice. This place is rock bottom. I’m pretty sure I know it better than any of you, but I’m clearly not the only one who sees it. All of us here, we’re all losers. We’re all fuck ups. We’re all lonely. But just because we’re lonely doesn’t mean we have to be alone.”
The room at large doesn’t know that she’s just nearly quoted Billy Joel’s Piano Man, and she doesn’t know it either, but the words feel good coming out of her. She knows by the rising emotional tide in the room that she’s on the right course. “Look around you. If you feel like shit because you’re stuck here in this room, then so does everyone else around you. You may not know it, but you’re a family.” She pauses, then repeats herself. “You’re a family. And tonight is the night that you act like it. That I act like it, that we all fucking act like it. So you can either decide that you really do give up, and you can sit here and get drunk and wait for the Marauders to come kill you like pigs. Or, you can stand up with your brothers and sisters and fight to protect them. You can either go up in an inferno like the rest of the town, or you can be the fire. What do you say?”
At first, the room is silent. One guy, Rachaad, asks, “Wait, there’s a fire.”
Rach blinks. “Oh, uh, yeah, there’s a fire. I don’t really know much about that part. What I do know is that you can either stay where you are, stay who you are, or we can all move our fucked up little family reunion outside and cause a little good natured chaos. I’ll ask it again, what do you say?”
This time, there’s no silence. The room erupts in a unanimous, uproarious applause. People bang on tables, people shout, people wrap their arms around each other and profess their platonic and non platonic love for each other. The place is alive with an electricity that Rach has never seen before. She’s totally swept up in the moment. A parade of people storm out of the room, weapons drawn, ready to fuck some shit up. Rach kisses someone. She doesn’t even know who, she doesn’t know, she doesn’t care. She’s just stoked that she did it. She watches with tears in her eyes as her family storms out of the place.
At the end of it all, Rach is alone in the bar. Or, at least, nearly alone. There are two other people still here in the bar with her. One of them is the bartender. At first, she’s upset that he didn’t go along with the crowd, but the panicked look on his face makes it clear that he’s not here by choice. The other person in the room, and likely the reason why the bartender knows not to stray too far from his post, is none other than Daisy Montego.
Rach doesn’t think twice. She’s so amped up that she knows she can’t fail. She runs up to Daisy and puts a hand on her massive shoulder. “Daisy. They need your help out there. These people are tough, but nobody in the Bantam Bar is tougher than you. If anyone is going to help sway the fight against the Marauders, it’s you.”
Daisy burps, then gestures with her hand for the bartender to pour her another beer, or else. “And why should I?” She’s got a fresh looking eye patch covering up the wound that Cannon made with his lacrosse stick the other night. It looks badass as hell, but it also makes Rach jump.
“Oh, uh, well, I don’t know if you heard my whole family speech back there, but, basically, we need to save our town. Together.” She says the last word with the enthusiasm of a camp counselor.
“This isn’t my town. This place is a broken doll. Fun to play with, but if it falls apart, who gives a shit? I’m a Montego. I’ll buy another.”
Rach feels like she’s been slapped across the face. She wants to reach out and slap Daisy right back, but right now, she’s her sister. “Daisy, come on. I know you’re not really from here, but this place is more your home than Seven Cities is. This is where you sleep, where you eat, where you, you know, beat the shit out of people. This is your home! These people are your family! Everyone else is out there doing their part. Even people who aren’t from here. That Marauder girl, that kid who thinks he’s the prince, and that pizza boy are all risking their lives as we speak. If they’re willing to--”
“--Pizza boy?”
“Wha? Yeah, the guy who--” she stops. She was so swept up in the rah rah go get ‘em tiger mindset that she didn’t really think about what she was saying, or who she was saying it to.”
“The pizza boy is out of jail?”
“Oop. Uh, no, he’s-- yeah, so, funny story. Warden Morgan, he--
“That sad excuse for a cop let him out, didn’t he?”
“Well, it’s not like that, he--”
“Where is he?”
“Uh, outside. Fighting for our lives.”
“Still alive?”
“I sure hope so.”
Daisy gulps down the rest of her drink. She spins around in her chair and pats Rach on the head with her humongous meat gloves. “I hope so, too. I’d like to have a chat with him.”
“Daisy, no, what are you--”
Daisy shoves Rach across the room. She hits the wall and immediately feels an aching soreness in all of her muscles. The night has been long as hell, and it’s about to get longer. She raises a hand to stop Daisy, but it’s too late. The behemoth of a woman ducks out the door.